Abstract
The inerter is a passive mechanical one-port element that is analogous to a capacitor in electrical circuits. It allows arbitrary passive mechanical impedances to be synthesised. Performance advantages have been identified in automotive suspensions, railway vehicle suspensions, motorcycle steering systems, etc. over traditional suspension structures. Through experimental testing, apparent nonlinearities have been identified for various physical realisations of the inerter. Hence, to predict the dynamic behaviour of such devices in real systems, full scale experiments may be necessary. The present paper, as an alternative, uses the framework of dynamically substructured systems (DSS) developed in previous works. Simulation results of using the linear and adaptive control strategies for DSS testing are included in the paper. It can be seen from the results that DSS method is still valid and the advantage of using the adaptive minimal control synthesis (MCS) algorithm is preserved, compared with linear control strategy.
